Tag Archives: the town that talks to the dead

InLily Dale: The Town That Talks to the Dead, Christine Wicker packs her bags and takes a good honest look at the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale and the mediums that call the place home. She views every experience with an open and respectful, yet unapologetic and skeptical eye, which I appreciated… even if I felt a bit guilty for appreciating it. The reader gets to follow what ends up being a cast of fascinating characters, including guests, mediums, and other members of the community. She asks the questions many of us would probably want to ask, but wouldn’t, because we’d be afraid of being offensive. Christine covers the good, the bad, and the dysfunction of Lily Dale (even juicy gossip among mediums)! And even though she stubbornly refuses to have a spiritual experience, there’s evidence that she does, even if it’s just temporary.

In the last five years or so, I’ve spent much of my time reading, experimenting, and researching all things “spirit communication”. After first reading about Lily Dale in a book aboutSpiritualism and the famous Fox Sisters, and after conversations with mediumLee Allen Howardand hearing about his trips to the famous Spiritualist camp, it has been a destination I’ve been very interested in learning about and possibly visiting. Also, six months ago I watched and reviewedNo One Dies in Lily Dale, the HBO documentary. As I mentioned in the comments of arecent post about this book, I think I’m going to have to watch the documentary again after reading Christine’s take on it all. I’ll make it to Lily Dale one of these days, but in the meantime I feel like the experience of reading this book was the next best thing.

Do you have any other recommendations on the topic of Lily Dale? Let me know in the comments below!

This has definitely been one of the longest blog droughts for me, and so if you’ve been waiting for new content, I apologize and thank you for your patience. I’m recovering from one of the most stressful few weeks I’ve ever had in my real gig. For a music teacher, December and May are particularly challenging, and sometimes they are a nightmare. For four days I did not return from work until 8 or 9 in the evening, and even then I did work up until bedtime. I finished off the week with a bang, and fortunately not literally, because I went roller skating on a field trip with many of our kids on Friday. It had been years. I’m proud to say that though the skills didn’t come back to me as fast as they did seven or eight years ago, I managed to do okay… and I DIDN’T FALL! I had a blast, though if the muscles in my right ankle could talk, they’d say something very different.

So here’s a little something for you today.

I learned this in the book Lily Dale: The Town That Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker, which I’m reading right now. Mediums at the turn of the century, real or hoaxers, were almost all women. Men were only okay with listening to these women mediums speak because it was men that were almost always being channeled through them. It was clear that these mediums were the real thing, because there is no way that a woman could come up with such great wisdom and answers on her own.

This either made you laugh or really annoyed you. Either way, I thought it was an interesting look back, and a great example of how far we’ve come in a century… though many would argue we’ve got a long way to go yet.